Introduction to R
Last updated: October 16, 2023
Prerequisites
- Geared specifically towards users who are new to R.
- Have R and RStudio installed (see setup instructions below).
Setup Instructions
R and RStudio are separate downloads and installations. R is the underlying statistical computing environment. It can be used on its own, but using R alone is no fun. RStudio is a graphical integrated development environment (IDE) that makes using R much easier and more interactive. You need to install R before you launch RStudio.
Be aware that the most recent version of RStudio requires R version 3.3.0 or later.
macOS
If you already have R and RStudio installed
- Open RStudio, and click on “Help” > “Check for updates”. If a new version is available, quit RStudio, and download the latest version for RStudio.
- To check the version of R you are using, start RStudio and the first thing
that appears on the terminal indicates the version of R you are running. Alternatively, you can type
sessionInfo()
, which will also display which version of R you are running. Go on the CRAN website and check whether a more recent version is available. If so, please download and install it.
If you don’t have R and RStudio installed
- Download R from the CRAN website.
- Select the
.pkg
file for the latest R version. Make sure you choose the appropriate version for your hardware (Apple silicon or Intel) - Double click on the downloaded file to install R
- Go to the RStudio download page
- Follow the link to download the latest version under “Install Rstudio”
- Double click the file to install RStudio
- Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.
Windows
If you already have R and RStudio installed
- Open RStudio, and click on “Help” > “Check for updates”. If a new version is available, quit RStudio, and download the latest version for RStudio.
- To check which version of R you are using, start RStudio and the first thing
that appears in the console indicates the version of R you are
running. Alternatively, you can type
sessionInfo()
, which will also display which version of R you are running. Go on the CRAN website and check whether a more recent version is available. If so, please download and install it. You can check here for more information on how to remove old versions from your system if you wish to do so.
If you don’t have R and RStudio installed
- Download R from the CRAN website.
- Run the
.exe
file that was just downloaded - Go to the RStudio download page
- Follow the link to download the latest version under “Install Rstudio”
- Double click the file to install it
- Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.
Linux
- Follow the instructions for your distribution
from CRAN, they provide information
to get the most recent version of R for common distributions. For most
distributions, you could use your package manager (e.g., for Debian/Ubuntu run
sudo apt-get install r-base
, and for Fedorasudo yum install R
), but we don’t recommend this approach as the versions provided by this are usually out of date. In any case, make sure you have at least R 4.0.0. - Go to the RStudio download page
- Follow the link to download the latest version under “Install Rstudio”
- Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.
Acknowledgements
Part of the materials for this tutorial are adapted from http://datacarpentry.org and http://softwarecarpentry.org.